The present invention relates to an adapter device which is connected to image capturing devices such as video cameras and transmits captured images to image browsing terminals at distant places through a network such as the Internet.
Recently, the broadband Internet such as ADSL or CATV system has become available at a relatively low cost, and an Internet server such as HTTP server and/or FTP server can be used as a home-use server.
Besides the HTTP server and/or the FTP server, a streaming server which transmits a real-time video image captured by a video camera or the like is now available. The streaming server is expected to be used for home security systems. Therefore, such a personal streaming server may be widespread as the broadband becomes popular.
In the meantime, recently, a digital camera provided with a CCD having several millions of image pixels has been developed and used. If such a digital camera and the streaming server are used in combination, an inexpensive network camera system having a high performance may be expected.
However, the size of the data output by such a digital camera may be approximately 1 Mega bytes even if the data is compressed. In order to transmit such data, even if the broadband transmission line is used, one through several seconds may be required to transmit one image. Depending on a condition of the communication line, more transmission time may be required. Therefore, even if such a digital camera is used to configure the network camera system, it is difficult to use the digital camera to transmit the high-resolution real-time image to a distant place.